A growing problem in the realm of information technology is managing, organizing, finding, and making use of electronic data available within a business organization. Though data may exist within the business organization, it is often difficult to locate when needed. Consequently, much effort is employed to manage and organize information so that it may be easily found and used. Although search technologies have made it easier to find electronically available information if it has already been structured and organized for public browsing on the Internet, finding information within a private computer network (intranet) remains difficult. For example, searching an intranet gives limited results in part because content creators are insufficiently or improperly motivated to make their content “interesting” (i.e., rich with links to related documents), or attractive. Consequently, few viewers are in turn motivated to link to such content.
Moreover, intranet web pages are ideally designed to provide information organized in an efficient, hierarchical structure, and do not necessarily aim to connect information to other information. Consequently, for many intranet searches only one content page contains the sought-for data, and few (sometimes zero) links point to that intranet web page from other pages. Making an intranet search even more difficult, intranet files often lack identifying characteristics to make the files stand out in a particular search.
Furthermore, some data available in an intranet is not search-engine-friendly or was never intended to be viewed directly. For example, data may be stored in locations that can't easily be crawled by a “web spider”, or data may be intended only to form a portion of a larger set of data.
Members of a business organization may wish to identify others in the organization having common interests and ideas, as suggested by their maintenance of identical or similar files. However, current search schemes generally provide results only for purposely published files.
Accordingly the inventors herein have recognized a need for an improved system and method for identifying computer users having files with common attributes.